Definition
In old French and Canadian law, a redevance was a periodic due or payment owed by a tenant to his lord as a condition of holding land. The term encompasses a broad category of feudal obligations — not limited to money payments — that might include renders of grain, labor, produce, or other in-kind services. It functioned as the recurring consideration a tenant owed for the privilege of tenure under the seigneurial system.
Redevance is best understood as a genus concept: the overarching class of recurring obligations flowing upward from tenant to lord, of which money rents, labor dues, and in-kind renders were all species.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In contemporary French, redevance means a fee, royalty, toll, or recurring charge — used in modern contexts ranging from broadcast license fees to mineral royalties.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not include redevance as an English entry, reflecting its status as a term imported from French legal usage rather than naturalized English vocabulary.
Editorial note: The modern French commercial meaning — a royalty or licensing fee — shares structural kinship with the legal term (both involve recurring payments for a right or privilege), but the legal term is specifically feudal and seigneurial in character. A researcher encountering redevance in a modern French or civil law context should not assume the feudal meaning; the term has evolved considerably in living French usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively relevant to researchers working in two narrow areas: (1) the history of French feudal law and its doctrinal structure, and (2) the legal history of Quebec and Louisiana, where the French seigneurial system was transplanted and remained operative for centuries after colonization.
In Quebec sources, the seigneurial system and its associated vocabulary — including redevance — persisted in legal records, notarial instruments, and land grants well into the nineteenth century. The system was formally abolished in Quebec by the Seigniorial Act of 1854, but litigation and documentation of pre-existing obligations continued long after. Researchers in Quebec legal history should expect to encounter redevance in land titles, censive grants, and censitaire records predating abolition.
The key trap: redevance appears in Canadian and Louisiana sources written in both French and translated English. Translations vary — it may appear as "dues," "rents," "royalties," or simply "charges." The in-kind dimension is frequently lost in translation; a source that renders redevance as "rent" may obscure that the original obligation was payable in grain or labor, not currency. This distinction could matter for historians tracing the economic character of specific seigneurial estates.
Researchers should also note that redevance, as a genus term, does not specify the type of obligation. For the particular money-payment species, the relevant term is cens; for labor obligations, corvée. Corpus searches limited to redevance alone will undercount related primary materials using these more specific terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary — are in precise agreement on the definition: dues payable by a tenant to his lord in old French and Canadian law, not necessarily in money. The consistency across sources reflects the term's narrow, well-settled scope; there is no doctrinal dispute or evolution to track across these references.
Burrill adds a citation to Dunkin's Address, page 19, which is the only primary source reference across the three dictionaries. This likely refers to a nineteenth-century address by Edwin Henry Dunkin concerning the seigneurial system in Canada, and researchers seeking primary elaboration of the term in its Canadian legal context may find that source useful.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is distinguish redevance from its related feudal vocabulary — cens, lods et ventes, corvée — or situate it within the broader architecture of the seigneurial system. Researchers should not treat any of these three entries as a sufficient account of the term's operational legal meaning in context; they are identification tags, not substantive analyses.
Jurisdictional Note
Redevance as a legal term of art is relevant primarily to Quebec and, to a lesser extent, Louisiana, where French civil and feudal law traditions took root. It has no operative meaning in common law jurisdictions and appears in American and English legal dictionaries only as a historical and comparative reference. Researchers in Louisiana should note that the French colonial seigneurial system was less thoroughly embedded there than in Quebec, and redevance appears less frequently in Louisiana legal sources.